Balance of Power
Putin's Preventive War: The 2022 Invasion of Ukraine
Barry Posen
International Security, Winter 2025, Pages 7-49
Abstract:
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is consistent with the logic of preventive war. States often initiate wars because they fear the consequences of a shifting balance of military power and thus strike to forestall it. They fear that, once the balance changes, the rising power may either attempt to coerce them, or initiate war later under much more favorable circumstances. The tendency to consider preventive war is exacerbated if the declining state also sees itself as having a special, and fleeting, window of opportunity to prevent the shift. This essay reviews a range of evidence to argue that Vladimir Putin likely viewed Russia's strategic situation through a preventive war frame. NATO membership for Ukraine would shift the balance of power against Russia, and U.S. and NATO military cooperation with Ukraine intensified during the Joe Biden administration. These developments likely convinced Putin that he did not have much time to forestall Ukraine's NATO membership.
The Damocles Delusion: The Sense of Power Inflates Threat Perception in World Politics
Caleb Pomeroy
International Organization, Winter 2025, Pages 1-35
Abstract:
How does power affect threat perception? Drawing on advances in psychological research on power, I find that the sense of state power inflates the perception of threats. The sense of power activates intuitive thinking in the decision-making process, including a reliance on gut feelings and cognitive shortcuts like heuristics and prior beliefs. In turn, as psychological IR research shows, these mechanisms tend to inflate threat perception. The powerful assess threats from the gut rather than the head. Experimental evidence from the US and China, a reanalysis of a survey of Russian elites, and a large-scale text analysis of Cold War US foreign policy elites lend support to this expectation. The findings help to psychologically reconcile enduring theoretical puzzles -- from "underbalancing" to "overextension" -- and generate entirely new ones, like the possibility that decision makers of rising, not declining, states feel more fear. Together, the paper offers a "first image reversed" challenge to bottom-up accounts of psychological IR. Decision-maker psychology is also a dependent variable shaped by the balance of power, with important implications for a world returning to great power competition.
Security without Exclusivity: Hybrid Alignment under U.S.-China Competition
Sheena Chestnut Greitens & Isaac Kardon
International Security, Winter 2025, Pages 122-163
Abstract:
This article explores an emerging dynamic in the international system: Countries across the world are engaged in simultaneous security cooperation with both China and the United States. China and the United States, however, do not provide the same types of security goods. The United States primarily offers regional security -- assistance that improves partners' capabilities to deter or deny external threats to their territory. China primarily offers regime security -- assistance that builds partners' capabilities to control their territory and populations, and often, to prevent threats to a regime's hold on power. Many countries benefit from both types of assistance, and neither China nor the United States is in a strong position to demand exclusivity from third countries. As a result, a growing number of countries are developing nonexclusive, differentiated security relationships with both great powers. We call this phenomenon "security hybridization" and demonstrate that it is theoretically and empirically distinct from traditional balancing and omnibalancing. We illustrate this dynamic with two case studies -- Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates. Each country engages in defense cooperation with the United States and, simultaneously, pursues increasingly robust internal security cooperation with China. Security hybridization distinguishes today's great power competition from Cold War rivalry and will likely shape patterns of domestic and global security in the years ahead.
Superintelligence Strategy
Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt & Alexandr Wang
NationalSecurity.AI Working Paper, March 2025
Abstract:
Rapid advances in AI are beginning to reshape national security. Destabilizing AI developments could rupture the balance of power and raise the odds of great-power conflict, while widespread proliferation of capable AI hackers and virologists would lower barriers for rogue actors to cause catastrophe. Superintelligence -- AI vastly better than humans at nearly all cognitive tasks -- is now anticipated by AI researchers. Just as nations once developed nuclear strategies to secure their survival, we now need a coherent superintelligence strategy to navigate a new period of transformative change. We introduce the concept of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM): a deterrence regime resembling nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD) where any state's aggressive bid for unilateral AI dominance is met with preventive sabotage by rivals. Given the relative ease of sabotaging a destabilizing AI project -- through interventions ranging from covert cyberattacks to potential kinetic strikes on datacenters -- MAIM already describes the strategic picture AI superpowers find themselves in. Alongside this, states can increase their competitiveness by bolstering their economies and militaries through AI, and they can engage in nonproliferation to rogue actors to keep weaponizable AI capabilities out of their hands. Taken together, the three-part framework of deterrence, nonproliferation, and competitiveness outlines a robust strategy to superintelligence in the years ahead.
Cyber Conflict & Domestic Audience Costs
Ryan Shandler
International Interactions, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cyber power is altering the nature of domestic audience costs. By exploiting voters' captivation with cyber conflict, leaders can now de-escalate crises without having to worry about suffering domestic censure. Such is the allure of cyber power among the mass public that even minor cyberattacks with little operational impact can placate voters' expectation of strong military force. In practice, this means that leaders who would otherwise be bound by domestic audience costs can "escape" by conducting disruptive cyberattacks that merely appear forceful to domestic constituents. To explore how cyber operations temper domestic escalatory pressures, I conduct a survey experiment that asks participants to evaluate presidential leadership following the deployment of cyber or conventional force. The findings confirm that the public view cyberattacks -- even ephemeral, inconsequential cyberattacks -- as sufficiently forceful to meet a leader's threat of force and placate their zeal for military action. Offering examples of how this theory has played out in multiple real-world incidents, I demonstrate how public enthusiasm for cyber power adds newfound flexibility to crisis decision-making.
Why International Organizations Don't Learn: Dissent Suppression as a Source of IO Dysfunction
Ben Christian
International Studies Quarterly, March 2025
Abstract:
International organizations (IOs) need to learn from their mistakes in order to improve their performance. Over the past decades, IOs have therefore invested significantly in building a professional learning infrastructure. However, as recent studies show, many IOs still struggle to learn from their mistakes. Why do IOs not learn despite all these formal learning processes and tools? I argue that the internal "criticism culture" -- the way IOs deal with criticism from their own employees -- is an overlooked but crucial variable that can help us explain the lack of learning in IOs. To illustrate this argument, I draw on an in-depth case study of the UN Secretariat and more than 50 interviews with UN staff members. First, I show that the internal criticism culture in the UN Secretariat's Peace and Security Pillar is repressive and self-restrained. Second, I demonstrate that this criticism culture leads to a double blockade that prevents the organization's formal learning infrastructure from performing as intended: UN employees do not dare to voice criticism in official formats, and "learning products" are glossed over as they move up the ranks. As a consequence, the IO lacks a necessary stimulus for learning, which results in performance problems.
Weapons and influence: Unpacking the impact of Chinese arms exports on the UNGA voting alignment
Xiaoyu He, Yaweng Zheng & Yiweng Chen
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the research exploring factors shaping China's influence, such causal influence from the perspective of Chinese arms transfers remains to be seen. In this study, we use arms exports and United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting data from 140 non-OECD countries between 1990 and 2021 to estimate the causal effect of Chinese arms exports on the recipients' voting alignments with China in the UNGA, with the voting alignment measured by the proportion of votes that a recipient casts in agreement with China. By using the interaction between the annual exchange rate and cross-country frequencies of receiving arms to construct an instrument, we isolate cleaner exogenous variations in Chinese arms exports. The 2SLS estimates reveal that Chinese arms exports lead to a significant increase in the share of votes cast in favor of China. We also offer plausible explanations for our findings, suggesting that arms recipients may be incentivized to align with China due to the strategic necessity of maintaining their ruling authority and the long-term dependence on Chinese arms supplies.
Atomic Arguments and Counter-Arguments: How Exposure to Conflicting Information Influences American Public Support for the Use of Nuclear Weapons
Scott Sagan & Benjamin Valentino
International Studies Quarterly, March 2025
Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for assessing the effectiveness of messaging designed to influence public opinion on the use of nuclear weapons. We argue that messages intended to decrease support for nuclear use are most effective when they meet three conditions. First, they must present subjects with novel counter-attitudinal information or interpretations that were not likely to be already incorporated into subjects' opinions. Second, they must provide salient information that resonates with the values and concerns of subjects. Third, since, in the real world, the public is likely to hear both arguments and counterarguments for important policy issues, effective messages must be resilient, maintaining their effect even when respondents are exposed to strong, competing messages. We use this framework to test the effects of different messages about the legality of nuclear use, the military effectiveness of nuclear weapons, and the potential for setting precedents for nuclear use by others. We find that most messages have only modest and reversible effects. Alerting subjects to the possibility that using nuclear weapons might set a precedent making American adversaries more likely to use them in the future, however, produces the most significant reduction in support for nuclear use.